Tiffany Masterson believes in a simple lesson: Sometimes, you need to trust your gut — even when everyone around you says you’re wrong.
Masterson is the founder of skincare brand Drunk Elephant, which launched in 2013 and sold to Japanese beauty company Shiseido in 2019 for a reported $845 million. At the very beginning, her friends and family thought she was making a huge business-killing mistake — with her company’s name.
“My best friend said, ‘No way … I gotta tell you, I hate it. I don’t like it,'” Masterson said on a recent episode of NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast. “My mom didn’t like it. My grandma said it was the most asinine thing she’d ever heard. A lot of people said it sounds like a bar.”
When Masterson was designing her company’s branding, she wanted to avoid naming it after herself. Most of her competitors were named after doctors or had French names, she said. She ended up drawing inspiration from marula oil, one of the ingredients she wanted to use in her moisturizers.
“I googled it, and a video came up of animals in South Africa eating marula fruit off the ground, fermented, and they were stumbling around,” said Masterson. “So the implication was they eat the fermented fruit [and] they’d get tipsy.”
She thought Drunk Elephant went perfectly with her quirky personality, but those closest to her thought she was insane, she said. She hired a publicist, who wanted her to put the name to a focus group, which would have cost $30,000 to assemble. Masterson also suspected the group would hate it, and other industry professionals would try to change her mind, she said.
In the end, she trusted herself — and it paid off. “I couldn’t listen to other people, because then where do you go with that?” said Masterson. “Then, I wouldn’t trust any choices I made … So I just went with it.”
‘Make decisions for yourself’
People often consult with mentors, bosses and friends for help — but you should always trust your intuition, according to LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky.
“Be able to balance a lot of different people’s opinions, but at the end of the day, you have to have your own conviction deep down and make decisions for yourself,” Roslansky told LinkedIn’s “The Path” podcast last year.
The next time you’re facing a career or business move, weigh the downsides and make a choice that feels right, even if others disagree, he advised.
“Take all the input, take what everyone’s saying and be aware of the situation around you,” said Roslansky. “But you’ve got to come from your own heart when you make a decision.”
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